Julia Child: Learned to cook properly at 37, on television at 50
She could barely cook when she married. She enrolled in a Paris cooking school at 37, spent nearly ten years on one book, and was turned down by the first publisher.
Not a cook
Julia McWilliams was born in 1912 in Pasadena, California. During the Second World War she worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence agency, as a typist, researcher and then head of a registry of documents, serving in Ceylon and China. She married Paul Child in 1946 and has said she could hardly cook at the time.
Back to school at 37
When Paul was posted to Paris, she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in 1949, at 37, in a class otherwise made up of former American servicemen. She then joined two French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, on a cookery book for American home cooks.
Rejected first
The book took nearly a decade. The first publisher to see the full manuscript turned it down as too long and too much like an encyclopedia. Another publisher took it, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in 1961.
What came of it
In 1963, aged 50, she began The French Chef on public television in Boston, filmed in long takes with mistakes left in. She kept working into her late eighties.
She learned a trade from scratch in her late thirties and took years over it. Starting late is fine if you are willing to be a beginner in front of other people.
The myth: She is sometimes called a wartime spy. Her work for the OSS was office and records work, not undercover work in the field.
Where the facts come from: Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme, My Life in France (2006); Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Julia Child's Kitchen.
